Better Product Integration using Nexus

Better integration and coordination across Value Streams using Nexus Framework - an agile scaling framework.

The Situation

Over a period of 5 years, ZXM supported the Australian Taxation Office (ATO) to create value streams and mature the way they managed their products across the agency.

The result of improved consistency across all value streams resulted in:

Improved transparency
Improved traceability of team work to strategic goals
Improved quality and reduced defects

With improved transparency came a better risk profile around coordination between product value streams, including dependency management. Business Owners and portfolio executives then looked to ZXM to find a way to:

Improve collaboration on dependencies between value streams
Improve the prioritisation of Features across the agency
Enhance and formalise the co-ordination between agile product teams

The Solution

A Nexus Framework from Scrum.org was chosen to assess its ability to scale integration touch points between teams within a value stream as well as between those value streams.

Nexus Scaling Framework

This Nexus framework formalised integration coordination between teams and was shown to successfully foster improved collaboration, communication, and resource sharing within Nexus groups.

To improve coordination of dependencies with external teams in different value streams, the Nexus model was able to scale to meet this need for end-to-end integration of delivery for organisation wide product initiatives.

ZXM collaborated with key leadership for one of the major programs and guided the thinking behind the Nexus construct which provided the framework for product based, cross-value stream collaboration.

The core aims of the Nexus pilot across delivery areas to strengthen cross-value stream relationships, break down work silos, and integrate working software earlier in the delivery cycle.

Better Integration and Coordination

The Nexus approach to cross-value stream delivery also provided several benefits such as:

Earlier identification of integration issues.
Resource sharing between value streams and their teams.
Improved communication and collaboration via “Nexus Daily Scrum” as well as combined planning, review and retrospective events.

The Results

The pilot of the Nexus model across value streams was largely considered successful and key benefits such as improved dependency management, improved communication and collaboration, were immediately evident.

An unexpected result from the heightenned level of transparency was the impact of agile product teams interacting with traditional functional teams. Some value streams felt that their functional teams were very productive. The cycle time data that resulted from Nexus demonstrated to executive the limitations of functional teams over cross-functional teams.

A single functional team couldn’t build an increment of software by itself
Functional teams had more team-to-team dependencies
More handoffs between teams increasing the time to produce working software
Reduced transparency of the state of releasable increments (given none could be produced in 2-weeks)
Functional teams had greater levels of rework — when one team found a defect it would return to the other team and their focus would shift from building software to fixing bugs
Functional teams had lower levels of throughput
Greater effort was needed to integrate across functional teams

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